“And what did your dad say?” Walt asked.
“He says he doesn’t know anything. Doesn’t know the girl or how my mom knew her or why she would write forgive me on the back of the photograph.”
Walt made a hmm sound—it was curious to him, got him thinking. “What can I do, Angie?” He sounded earnest.
“What do you remember from that time? About my dad’s business dealings. There’s something there.”
“Why don’t you ask your dad?”
Angie looked again out the window and saw Louise bent over her nascent flower garden weeding without gloves on. The garden wasn’t much to look at now, but it would be glorious in a few more weeks. Louise was quite gifted with plants.
Angie looked back at Walt. “I guess I was hoping you could tell me.” For whatever reason it felt better than saying, “I don’t trust my dad to tell me the truth.”
“Tell you why there wasn’t a trial?”
“It seems to me my dad got a free pass into witness protection. He committed crimes and got away with it.”
“Hardly got away scot-free,” Walt said. “He had to give up his entire life, his family, your mom’s family. It was hardly an easy road.”
Angie couldn’t disagree there. “Okay. And just to reiterate, I don’t hold any of this against you. You were just doing your job.”
“And just to reiterate, I think of you as a niece,” Walt said. “You’re family to me. That’s what’s important. Not a name on a piece of paper.”
Angie thanked him, and didn’t mention that Bao had told her something similar. She got up from the table. “Well, wish me luck, Uncle Walt.”
“Luck with what?”
“I’m going to take your advice and confront my dad again. And this time I’m not going to leave until he tells me the truth once and for all. I’m going to make him go through all of his business dealings until I know everything about his past, and figure out how my mom was connected to Isabella Conti.”
Walt’s expression changed. He looked like someone who’d just remembered where he set down his missing car keys. “You know, you got me thinking. Let me check something for you in my files. Hang on a second. No promises.”
Angie agreed to wait. She drank her water and looked out at the lawn, watching Louise hard at work, thinking about her mother and how much she’d enjoyed gardening.
Angie read e-mails on her phone and the time slipped away without her noticing, but it seemed like he had been gone for a while. She held out hope for a minor miracle, a piece of paper, some sort of official document to explain the unexplainable.
But Walt returned empty-handed. “I’m sorry, Angie. I thought there might have been something in my old files, but I was wrong. My guess is your dad never had a trial. That had happened before. He gave up information and in exchange, no charges were filed.”
Angie gave Walt a big hug. “A friend of mine said the same thing. Thanks for looking, but I’m not giving up. I’ll figure this out with my dad, one way or another.”
Walt held Angie’s shoulders and looked deeply into the eyes. “I have every confidence you will.”
CHAPTER 56
Home again, home again. Angie used her key to go in through the front door. The TV wasn’t on, but then again the Nats weren’t playing. She called out to her dad, knowing he was at home because his Lexus was in the driveway. If he happened to be taking a walk, it would be downstairs on his elliptical in the basement where he had a second television set up.
“Daddy? I need to speak with you,” Angie said, setting her purse on the little desk in the kitchen that had become a catchall for odds and ends.
As she had expected, her father was at home—in the first floor office, judging by the sound of his footsteps.
She was already rummaging through the refrigerator when he came into the kitchen. She needed a bit food to calm what felt like a caffeine overdose, and found a bowl of egg salad on a shelf and half a loaf of bread misplaced in the drawer where the vegetables go. Her mother never would have put the bread there, though she did keep it refrigerated.
Angie took the items over to the kitchen island and only then acknowledged her father’s presence. Gabriel had on faded jeans, a denim work shirt, and looked quite relaxed, not at all like someone carrying a burdensome secret for years.
Angie took down a plate from the cupboard and set it next to the food. She poured herself a glass of water. “Do you want a sandwich, Dad?”
“You’re not done with this, are you?” Gabriel said.
“Nope, not even close,” Angie replied. She retrieved a dull knife from a kitchen drawer and heaped some egg salad onto the bread. She spread the egg salad evenly, then cut the sandwich in two, took a bite, and chewed slowly. She washed it all down with a drink of water. “I hope you don’t have plans today, because we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”
“Angie, please.”
She took another bite, leaning against the kitchen island, acting as though she had all the time in the world. “No more, please. No more lies. Somehow your former business and Mom’s former life are connected to Isabella Conti, and I’m determined to figure out how.”
“I told you all I know.”
“Please, Dad, that doesn’t work anymore. I checked. There’s nothing about William Harrington in any archives I searched. Nothing about your Ponzi scheme or the trials where you turned state’s evidence. And I’m pretty good at this stuff. There should be something, but there’s nothing. So either you’re not giving me the whole truth or you’re forgetting some key details, but either way, I’m not leaving until we sort it out.”
It was a test. If he came up with the same explanation Bryce and Walt had offered, she might be inclined to believe him.
But instead of a valid explanation, Gabriel shook with anger. His face turned red and his eyes flared in anger. “I will not be spoken to this way by my daughter.”
Angie refused to be rattled. She took another bite of her sandwich, chewing slowly, keeping her eyes fixed on her father, intending her actions to be interpreted as a show of defiance. “Then tell me what I want to know,” she said after swallowing her bite.
“No.”
“Tell me or I’m going to find the Conti family, dammit.” Anger seeped into Angie’s voice. “I’ve got a friend with the Marshals now, or did you forget? He’ll help me. He’ll run this up the damn flagpole if he has to. I promise you, we’ll dig up whatever secret you’re hiding. So let’s do this on your terms, not mine. What is the connection to the Conti family and my mom? Why aren’t there stories about you in the news? Why aren’t you being forthcoming with me?”
Her father’s face turned bright red. “Enough!” he said, stomping his foot so hard he rattled the dishes in the cupboard. He stormed over to the kitchen island, picked up Angie’s plate of food, and hurtled it across the room against the wall.
The plate shattered, sending jagged shards of the dish and bits of the sandwich shooting in all directions like shrapnel. Angie ducked and covered her ears, startled and scared.
“Enough!” Gabriel yelled again. “I will not be spoken to this way!”
“You’re hiding something!” Angie screamed back at him, pointing her finger at his face. “What the hell are you hiding?”
Gabriel turned and stormed out of the kitchen. He went to the TV room and turned on the television, cranking the volume.
“Talk to me, Dad.”
Gabriel wouldn’t respond, so Angie went back to the kitchen and cleaned up the mess.
Time passed, and Angie’s hopes that her father would relent began to dim. She went into the living room and sat on the sofa. The announcer for some History Channel documentary was the only one talking.
After some time, still not having said a word, Gabriel rose from his favorite chair and Angie trailed him into the spacious first floor office adjacent to the living room. Sun spilled inside through a bank of windows overlooking the backyard—a yard still in need of mowing.
&
nbsp; Unwilling and unable to endure the silence a moment longer, she decided to press him again. She touched his shoulder. A connection made. “What are you hiding from me, Dad?” she asked in a gentler voice.
Gabriel kept his back to his daughter, sorting through some papers on the desk, pretending not to hear her. He was breathing hard.
“Did Mom have an affair? Am I Antonio Conti’s daughter? What is it? What?”
“No,” Gabriel said harshly, turning to face her. “It’s none of that.” His voice carried less of an edge, suggesting to Angie that he might be softening.
“Then what?” Angie’s eyes were pleading as she reached for her father’s hand. “It’s enough. Just tell me.”
Gabriel titled his head slightly and gazed at his daughter with love in his eyes. “Enough is right,” he said in a quiet voice, almost to himself. “I should have known you wouldn’t let it go. I had hoped, but . . . maybe it’s time. Maybe all this has happened for a reason. You’re safe now. That’s enough for me.”
“I don’t understand.”
Gabriel touched Angie’s cheek with two plump fingers, one of which still carried his wedding ring. He set his hands on her shoulders. His back was turned to the bank of windows, and sunlight streaming in lit him in an angelic glow. Angie saw herself reflected in the lens of her father’s glasses. She looked misshapen, not unlike how she felt.
“You would figure it out one way or another. I have no doubts about that. None whatsoever. But no matter what happens, no matter what I tell you,” Gabriel said, “please know I love you very much, and I’m so incredibly proud of the woman you’ve become.”
“Daddy, what is it?” Angie’s chest tightened. Dread overwhelmed her.
“I’m so sorry,” Gabriel said, sputtering his words as tears welled in his reddened eyes.
To Angie, it looked as though he had aged a dozen years in a matter of seconds. “Tell me, please.”
Instead of her father’s voice, the next sound Angie heard was a whip cracking noise, followed by the sound of breaking glass. The noise startled her. It was loud and unexpected and it sounded very close by.
Gabriel lurched forward, knocked off balance. He fell hard into Angie and his momentum carried them both to the floor where they landed in a tangled heap.
Did he have a heart attack? Angie’s thoughts were reeling and her father’s weight felt crushing. Using her arms and legs for leverage, she rolled her father off her body. He spilled onto his back, breathing erratically, eyes glued to the ceiling, head not moving.
“Dad, are you all right?”
Angie felt a stab of fear when her father didn’t respond. On her hands and knees, she leaned over her father’s face and tried to get a look into his eyes. She felt something warm and wet spread against her fingertips.
She looked behind her and saw that the floor around her father’s lower back was coated in red where blood was seeping out. Her fingers were sticking into the blood.
Angie screamed and rolled Gabriel onto his stomach, seeing for the first time the hole in his denim shirt, singed around the edges as though the fabric had been burnt. Blood gushed out the hole and spread across Gabriel’s denim shirt.
Angie pressed her hand against the wound, but blood pulsed through the cracks of her fingers. “Dad! Dad! Oh my God! Oh God!”
Her eyes were wide, breath shaky, body frozen from terror. She thought first about calling an ambulance, not what had caused her father to fall down bleeding. It took a moment for her fragmented thinking to gel into a sensible narrative—her father had been shot.
Movement in Angie’s periphery drew her attention to a male figure lurking in the doorway. He was tall and thin with a clean-shaven face and unsettling pale blue eyes. He must have entered through the patio door. He held in his hands a high-powered rifle with an attached scope and what appeared to be a suppressor screwed into the barrel. He had more guns holstered to a battle belt secured around his black tactical pants. A black long-sleeved combat shirt and black leather boots completed his ensemble. The man’s expression was a blank.
He stood five feet away, give or take, essentially point blank range. Without uttering a word, the intruder lifted his gun and took aim, not at Gabriel, but at Angie. A bullet was coming her way, and she gritted her teeth to brace for impact and the blackness to follow. Would it hurt? It was human nature to fear pain, same as it was to freeze in the face of one’s imminent death. The intruder’s aim was high, and Angie imagined the bullet would enter through the center of her skull.
Instead of a gunshot, Angie heard her father grunt loudly.
The man’s attention pivoted to Gabriel. What could have been a threat was nothing more than a bleeding man’s slow roll toward the office doorway. The man trained the barrel of the rifle away from Angie and onto Gabriel, who continued his deliberate roll toward his assailant, smearing in his wake a jagged trail of blood.
Angie knew what was coming. She understood somehow what her father had intended, and she had a choice to make. She could scream, cry out for her dad, and try to plead with this killer for mercy. Or she could use the precious few seconds he had given her to strike.
Bullets spit out the barrel of the rifle with the same whip crack sound—not silent, but not at all deafening. Three shots were fired, each chambered using the rifle’s bolt action. The bullets exploded Gabriel’s stomach, neck, and head in that order.
The killer quickly refocused his weapon away from the bloody remains of Gabriel DeRose and back onto Angie. But Angie was no longer in the same line of sight as before. She had gone onto her stomach and crawled toward the assailant while he was busy murdering her father.
Barely able to contain shock and horror, she’d managed to slither on her belly, traveling three feet at most. She had covered just enough distance. With her arms extended out front like giant antennae, she got to within reach of the killer’s ankles. She grabbed hold, her fingers digging hard into the pliable leather of his black boots, and pulled with all her strength. The attacker got off a shot as he fell, but the bullet struck the wall behind the office desk, sending bits of plaster and drywall shooting out in various directions.
The killer fell to the floor with a hard crash. Angie heard air explode from his lungs. She was on top of him in a flash, striking him in the throat with a well-timed and well-placed punch. He gurgled and wheezed after impact. She dared not strike again and scrambled to her feet, mouth open and twisted in a silent scream. Gaining traction and balance, she raced to the front door, the closest way out.
The knob wouldn’t turn, and no matter how hard she pushed and pulled, the door wouldn’t budge. What was wrong? The killer was groaning, getting back to his feet. No way to back track now.
Somehow the killer must have barricaded them inside. Angie figured he had done the same to the side entrance in the kitchen. She gave only a moment’s consideration to going out the kitchen window. She would have to break the glass, climb over the sink, push her way past the jagged shards to freedom. Too hard. Too much time. She imagined it would be the last act she would ever do. Angie made a different choice and rushed to the basement door in the middle of the kitchen.
She was headed downstairs, where her father used his elliptical.
And where he kept his guns.
CHAPTER 57
The Markovich search was at a standstill. Most everyone, including the team with the SOC (now with Cormack Donovan’s help) were fumbling about in the dark, and not making any progress whatsoever.
Bryce had had some success, though on a completely different front. His contact, Tim Wiley, who had provided him with information on Antonio Conti, worked out of headquarters and happened to be in the building on a Saturday, helping with the Markovich effort. Bryce stopped by Wiley’s office and asked him for a second favor. He needed a little digging into the DeRose identity.
After a couple minutes on his computer, Wiley looked at Bryce with a strange expression on his face. “What are you up to, Taggart?”
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p; “Just . . . um, nothing really. Just . . . Timmy, help me out, will ya? And don’t ask any questions.”
“Yeah, okay,” Wiley said. “But you just pinpointed a second screwed up case with no explanation.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just like with Antonio Conti, only in reverse. I got the DeRose identity here all right—Gabriel, Kathleen, and Angie—but no clue who they were beforehand. There’s absolutely nothing in the case file to tell me.”
Bryce’s expression became strained. He gave Wiley the name William Harrington to search.
“Nope. Nothing there,” Wiley said. “Everything is a hornet’s nest with you. Who screwed up these damn case files so badly?”
Bryce was headed for the door. “That’s what I intend to find out.”
It felt good to breathe fresh air again. Bryce found his car in the crowded parking lot and got settled in the driver’s seat, figuring he’d head off to Alexandria once he got in touch with Angie. Another bit of unsettling news was headed her way. His call rang several times before going to voice mail. He called again and got the same result. Then he called Angie’s office and someone answered, a man whose voice sounded familiar.
“DeRose and Associates. How may I help you?”
“This is Bryce Taggart. I’m looking for Angie DeRose.”
“Hey Bryce, Mike Webb here. We did the job in Baltimore together. I work with Angie.”
“Of course. How are you?”
“Better than you, I think. Heard our boy Markovich did a vanishing act.”
“That he did,” Bryce said. “And a good one at that. Sorry to be in a rush, but is Angie around? It’s sort of urgent.”
“No sir,” Mike said. “Haven’t heard from her. I left a couple messages about a runaway case we’re working. It’s not like her to not to call us back. If you get in touch, could you tell her to give me a call?”
“Will do. Has anybody checked her apartment?” Bryce was headed there next.
“My partner, Bao, went over to her place, but she’s not at home. I’m sure she’s busy with her other investigation.”
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